One of the main reasons to choose a CMS (Content Management System) as one like the WordPress platform is it’s search engine friendliness. Making wordpress search engine friendly is, basically, to improve search engine readability. The reasons for you to make this changes are so to improve this friendliness, and this is not a minor thing to consider.

A word about search engines: google.com is the ultimate search engine website. With almost 98% of all search traffic being routed via their website and their automated advertisment campaigns (aka. adwords) we want to be google friendly. In fact, most other search engines (as Microsoft’s bing, Yahoo, etc) make use of google to feed their own systems. So, google.com is the place to be. We will make our website the more “google friendly” we can. And, luckily, this can be made with very little effort.

Permalinks

First, let´s change the way your URL’s show in the address toolbar of your web client (internet explorer, google chrome, firefox, etc.) By default, the wordpress instalation uses interrogation symbols and a lot of numbers to reach each page in your website. This is not so friendly to search engines. In fact, a simple “houses.html” would be more useful if you wanted to be placed in the search engine directory under “houses” keyword. And what would be great would be to simply use the post title as a url address. So, if you made a post under tha title “Nice Houses”, then this post page could be reached via “www.yourwebsite.com/nice-houses”.

In wordpress this is a very simple configuration. Please go to “Options>Permalinks” and change “Common Options” selection to “Date and Name” and save your changes. Once this is done, the whole database will be updated, and from now on, your pages will be reachable in the form “http://www.yourwebsite.com/2009/11/02/sample-post/”.

All in One SEO

Now, we will wan’t to prepare our webpages (not only the page address) for google indexation. This is not a complex process. I personally recommend a wordpress plugin named “All in One SEO”. This plugin will allow you to customize your keywords, title and description (and other meta tags) in an every page and a sitewide basis.

Once active, you will be able to access a link under “Options>All in One SEO”. Please enable it, and change the home title, description and keywords to convenience. Make sure Canonical URLS and Rewrite Titles are checked. The rest should be left more or less the same.

That’s it. If you followed every step, your website should be up and ready to be google indexed in no time. A final word: allthouhg indexing is a fairly straight forward process, ranking (google placement of your website in a visible, reachable, searchable position) is not. On the contrary, usulally this is a very complex and lengthy process that requires analysis and a good strategy for your website to be properly placed in google. If you’d like further information on this process please contact us, we sell SEO services and would like very much to assist you anyway.

We hope this helped you making wordpress Search Engine Friendly.

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